Elsa clasped her hands and leaned forward, looking across the lake in the Bois de Boulogne.
“I would like to live long enough to be sure of that,” she said, eagerly. “If we have children, my husband, perhaps they will listen to our tales of the war as Franz and I read about wolves and goblins in our fairy-tales. The fearfulness of them was not frightening, for we knew we were safe.”
“God grant that,” said Brand, gravely.
“But I am afraid!” said Elsa. She looked again across the lake, so blue under the sky, so golden in sunlight; and shivered a little.
“You are cold!” said Brand.
He put his arms about her as they sat side by side, and her head drooped upon his shoulder and she closed her eyes like a tired child.
They went to the opera that night and I refused their invitation to join them, protesting that they would never learn to know each other if a third person were always present. I slipped away to see Pierre Nesle, and found him at an office in a street somewhere off the Rue du Louvre, which was filled with young men whose faces I seemed to have seen before under blue shrapnel helmets above blue tunics. They were typewriting as though serving machine-guns, and folding up papers while they whistled the tune of “Madelon.” Pierre was in his shirtsleeves, dictating letters to a poilu in civil clothes.
“Considerable activity on the western front, eh?” he said when he saw me.
“Tell me all about it, Pierre.”
He told me something about it in a restaurant where we dined in the Rue du Marché St. Honoré. He was one of the organising secretaries of a society made up exclusively of young soldiers who had fought in the trenches. There was a sprinkling of intellectuals among them—painters, poets, novelists, journalists—but the main body were simple soldiers animated by one idea—to prevent another war by substituting the common-sense and brotherhood of peoples for the old diplomacy of secret alliances and the old tradition of powerful armies.